Should This Be Blue Penciled or Circled Red: A Transcultural Interdisciplinary Study on Colors

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Journal on English Language Teaching, v3 n1 p30-37 Jan-Mar 2013

Color terms are one of the constituents of Chomskey's substantive universals, and they exist in all languages. Colors usually bear cultural implications as well, since they are adopted to express intentions metaphorically. Colors may then become symbols that represent certain objects, emotions, facts, etc. of their environment. This culture-oriented facet of color terms can create complexity in language learning process and also in the practice of translation. As languages share some basic concepts, and express them through different expressions and symbols, the interest of this study was to answer the following question: are there any shared concepts between English and Persian that are represented (symbolized) by different colors? By collecting a number of expressions which held color terms, the complexity of this territory of intercultural communication was demonstrated along with its impacts on second/foreign language learning and translation practice. Slight differences at the linguistic surface level can occasionally cause difficulties especially when the deep structure is the same in both languages and cultures. More specifically and for the purpose of this study, when the same concept is represented through different colors, this is likely to cause difficulties. Failing to communicate via appropriate surface structures is probable to lead to cultural shocks in the listener (in case of language communication) or reader ( in case of translation), and impedance in the interlingual communication flow.

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